History of Ibm - International Business Machines Corporation

IBM- International Business Machines Corporation

History:

Though the building blocks of IBM reach back into the mid 1880's, the company was officially founded in 1911 when Charles F. Flint engineered the merger of Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, Computing Scale Company of America and International Time Recording Company. The agreed upon name was Computing- Tabulating- Recording Company or C-T-R. C-T-R soon found itself struggling do to over diversification of its product. In 1914 Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was brought in to help homogenize the company. He succeeded to turn the company around in just 11 months and redirected its focus to producing large-scale, custom-built tabulating solutions for businesses and left the rest of their former endeavors to the competition. Over the next four years, with Watson at the helm, the company's revenues doubled and expanded operations to Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.

Over the next decade C-T-R continued to innovate in their industry and bought out addition companies and patents. This additional growth of the company made the old name too limited for their ambitious pursuits and in 1924 they formally changed the name over to International Business Machines Corporation or IBM.

Throughout the Great Depression IBM was able to continue to grow and innovate even when demand for their products began to drop. Because of their build op of data processing machines IBM won the governments social security act contract in 1935 and became responsible for keeping track of 26 million people, essentially ensuring a strong future for the company for at least the next decade.

In the 1940's IBM with a joint effort from Harvard University completed the first ever Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, also called the Mark I. In the 1950's IBM's computers became smaller and more practical for business applications such as billing, payroll and inventory control. In the 1960's Thomas J. Watson, Jr took over control of the company from his father and directed into a new more consumer friendly environment. IBM was the first computing company to sell computers without software bundled into the package, this move would spawn the multi-billion dollar software industry that exist today, of which IBM is still an industry leader.

In the 1970's and 80's